Water & Wastewater Treatment

www.wwtonline.co.uk | WWT | FEBRUARY 2016 | 15 Project focus Asset management Rethinking asset performance data at NI Water Project focus A project using the data on wastewater pumps has successfully paved the way for Northern Ireland Water to change the way it uses asset performance data in its network operations. The utility is making a host of changes to the way it does business in the current PC15 regulatory period under the banner of its 'Achieving Customer Excellence' programme. The aims of the programme include ● Wastewater pumps in Lisburn used to test 'production line' concept ● Joined-up thinking allows speedy use of data in network operations ● Energy, maintenance and incident data brought together on corporate asset register ● Maximise the value from data held across the business ● Use information to allow a reactive, customer-focused solutions to problems ● Ensure maintenance budgets are allocated eff ectively - Drivers 'production lines' of water and wastewater. As a pilot project to test how this would work, performance data on 68 wastewater pumping stations in Lisburn was collated and shared with local … eld teams to see if it would result in bene… cial changes of approach. Conor Courtney, Asset Performance Engineer at NI Water and technical lead for the project, said that the data available on these stations included pump running times, energy costs and information on maintenance visits and reactive call-outs. However, identifying where it was all held and collating it was far from straightforward. "One of the things we found early on was that while we are the only team that is called asset performance, there was a lot of other asset performance work that was taking place within the business, in various teams and for various reasons," says Courtney. "So one of the … rst tasks was really setting out to identify all those bits and pieces of information, and going through it to determine how useful it may be. That showed the amount of work that was going on that just wasn't centralised." Once collated, the key data sets needed to be linked to the corporate asset register, so the information on a particular pumping station was available whenever its individual asset number was looked at. The exercise revealed how mobile work management information from … eld engineers' tough books – containing details of reactive jobs and planned maintenance – might be matched up with historical information from the telemetry system which shows the status of pumps. So, for example, when a responding to a call about a pumping station with two or three pumps, engineers could bene… t from knowing the schedule on which each pump has been running, how oŽ en the pumps tripped through weather conditions and the relative workload of each pump in recent months. IT specialists working in business putting customer service at the heart of operations, getting greater value from every pound spent, … nding new ways to manage performance and pursuing a more joined-up approach to operating and maintaining assets. As part of these goals, Northern Ireland Water is looking to integrate its asset performance team – which has until now been strategic in nature and therefore separate from operations – into the two operational JAMES BROCKETT EDITOR WATER & WASTEWATER TREATMENT The production lines are part of a new organisational model envisaged for NI Water

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